Andrew Falkous is concerned about nostalgia. To a certain extent, he owes Mclusky’s comeback to it. He’s under no illusion about that. “The second that you take to the stage, you’re triggering memories in the case of 60 per cent of the audience,” he recognises. “They’re remembering the dreams they once had. They’re remembering a time when their parents could walk around unaided. They’re remembering a time when you could feasibly pretend that you didn’t know Morrissey was problematic, because the glaring evidence wasn’t pushed into your feed 14 times a day.” Nostalgia has to be addressed as openly and honestly as possible, he believes. “But, at the same time, you’ve got to head it off at the pass and fucking knock it off that pass and watch it tumble into a ravine.”
Let’s not dwell too heavily on the past, then. There is little need, as we’ve covered it before. Suffice to say, Mclusky formed in Cardiff and in the early 2000s released three albums of shouty, Pixies-influenced alternative indie rock music. When they split in January 2005, their bassist and co-vocalist, Jon Chapple, focused on Shooting At Unarmed Men and then moved to Australia. Singer and guitarist Andrew Falkous and drummer Jack Egglestone relaunched as Future Of The Left, initially with members of Jarcrew. The reputation of Mclusky grew in its absence, if not to the size of My Bloody Valentine’s then at least to that of a post hardcore act who could sell out Dingwalls.
After about a decade, Mclusky began playing occasional shows again, sans Chapple, for charity at first and then more frequently for payment, with new bassist Damien Sayell of The St. Pierre Snake Invasion. Whereas Falkous remembers, the first time round, playing concerts in Detroit where even the bar staff left halfway through because they had no customers to serve, on last year’s North American tour Mclusky performed to about 1,000 people in New York and Chicago. It’s a bit like that Anvil documentary, with shorter haircuts, fewer guitar solos and less reverence for Metallica.
Now, Mclusky are set to release their first album since 2004’s The Difference Between Me And You Is That I’m Not On Fire. If anyone uses the new record, The World Is Still Here And So Are We, as an excuse to witter on about how marvellous the last one was, it’ll follow the frustrating pattern in which Falkous has often felt trapped, as if Bill Murray had bought himself a modest board of distortion pedals instead of piano lessons. Other musicians will relate to Falkous’ predicament. Each step he’s taken has been in the shadow of the last. “Mclusky Do Dallas wasn’t considered to be a classic when it came out [in 2002]. Far from it,” he recalls. “It was considered to be a classic pretty much exactly when The Difference Between Me And You came out.”
Future Of The Left, in their early years, had to strive to shake-off the reputation of Falkous’ former band. Their second album, 2009’s Travels With Myself And Another, turned out to be their lowest selling. Even so, it became a benchmark for its follow-ups, notes Falkous. “I think it bears examination in the music fan and the critic,” he says. “Everybody is scared of change. I’m petrified of it on the basis of my lunch. But in terms of our art, I think we all need to be a bit more French and embrace it.”
The World Is Still Here And So Are We updates and expands the Mclusky sound without by any means rehashing what came before. Certain key ingredients are still present. Thick distortion. Chunky riffs. Clattering drums. Catchy refrains. The sense that this is a live unit, playing as one, creating songs with their rowdy and chest-rattling gig impact in mind. It’s got some incredible song titles, as you’d expect. ‘The Competent Horse Thief’, ‘Kafka-esque Novelist Franz Kafka’, ‘Not All Steeplejacks’, etc. Of course, there are delightfully sharp lyrics to match.
Does it sound like the follow-up to The Difference Between Me And You, though? Hardly. It’s not what any immediate sequel would’ve sounded like, anyway. Its music is denser, perhaps, than what came before and more intricate without being, say, math rock. Furthermore, the varied and often eccentric vocal ideas that Falkous tried out on his Christian Fitness side-project haven’t done him any harm.
In this exclusive interview, Falkous talks time, tinnitus and the “technical stuff”.
I’m going to throw this out there and say the new album doesn’t sound like Mclusky. Or certainly not Mclusky as it was over 20 years ago.
Well, it hasn’t been recovered from a time capsule so it’s not going to sound like that. I’m not going to convince you that you’re wrong. I probably won’t even touch the sides of your mania. But it is Mclusky. Firstly, because it’s the three people in the room who are writing the songs. It’s very important to be Mclusky without cosplaying Mclusky. That was important when we were doing The Difference Between Me And You, not to cosplay Mclusky Do Dallas. Because as fun as that record is, a man plays distorted bass. A man sings obliquely about something which has not pissed him off as much as some people think. There’s a little guitar melody. The man sings pretty much the same thing again but changes one or two words in order to appear creative. The little guitar thing happens again. There’s a little twist and that’s the end of the song. Repeat. That worked for that record, for the most part. When it came to the next one, writing music exactly like that again was the most boring thing which could possibly have happened.
Damien is ultimately the gatekeeper of what is and isn’t Mclusky because he was a fan of the band whereas Jack and I, through no fault of our own, are entirely trapped within our own consciousnesses and our own timeline, and by virtue of the reality of physics we’ve never seen the band live.
I suppose it’s not going to be the same, is it? There’s one different member. Presumably you’re playing different instruments. Do you literally still have the same guitar?
No. Does Jack have the same drums? We have actual instruments that work now.
Besides, you’re all different atoms and cells.
Oh yeah, those will have generated a few times over. We all have different bits of Genghis Khan in us now. That’s what will have happened. Maybe we got a slightly different psychological profile of Genghis Khan. Maybe his Sunday profile. Basically, you go where the songs lead you in terms of a record. That’s the way I look at it. I don’t come to a record with an agenda and say, “Let’s write an album that makes people think about bedroom tax,” or whatever.
‘Cops And Coppers’ sounds like The Specials.
On the offbeat, if that’s your frame of reference, yeah. There are worse bands to sound like. Before the band was called Mclusky, it was called Best. Not my decision. We got a review in some Cardiff student magazine and it said we sounded like a cross between 3 Colours Red and the Propellerheads. Right? Then you read the rest of the student newspaper and you see that 3 Colours Red and the Propellerheads were clearly the only bands the person reviewing the records had heard. So in that world, if the only rock band you’ve heard is Northern Uproar, you’d see The Jesus Lizard and you’d go, “Oh! Sounds quite a lot like Northern Uproar to me.” Am I going to say your Specials comparison is as fatuous as that? No. I get it. It’s got this weird otherworldly jauntiness to it, as well as simply being on the offbeat like a ska song. I normally don’t say the S-word. I’m morally opposed to ska on most occasions, even though I grudgingly accept it does make people in shorts happy.
That’s why I wasn’t expecting it, I suppose.
Well, I wasn’t expecting it. I love it when a song comes together and it has a weird structure, in terms of verses and choruses and all that. You know, technical stuff. But it doesn’t wear that very heavily because it seems so natural to the song. Sometimes you read a book and it can be clever and eye-opening but you very much get the impression that the author is going, “This is a bit fucking clever, isn’t it? Watch out! How am I going to catch you next time?” Whereas other art drips through you and can be hopefully… I don’t want to say “organically clever” or we’ll have to end this interview now and I’ll have to ram my head through a garden fence. And we don’t even have a garden. Make of that what you want.
I noted down some YouTube comments during the vast research I conducted for this interview. With ‘Way Of The Exploding Dickhead’, there was a debate regarding whether it was ripping off a Pissed Jeans video.
When Remy [Lamont] came up with the treatment, I went, “Oh. I think there’s a Pissed Jeans video in a gym.” I sent him a link and he went, “Nah. Don’t worry about that. Ours is totally different.” And that’s the answer.
Someone else said “Idles have one where they are in a gym as well. Idles are shit though.”
They say if you’re building a world, you’ve got the iceberg at the top but there’s more of the iceberg underneath, so I’m getting to know more about the internet this way. Jack sent me a radio interview, I won’t go into the details, where somebody was slagging us off. Jack never gets angry. He once got angry with a homeless man in Sydney for kicking over his pink lemonade. That was the only time I’ve ever seen him get angry. He sent me a link and told me to listen to it. I’m absolutely not going to listen to the thing which will make me angry, am I? Why would you do that to yourself? Hey! Do you want to jump through a portal? You will be taken to a place where everybody says things that make you unhappy. Why would you possibly go there?
Then another person said Judas Priest had one in a gym in 1982. I think the earliest example mentioned is Olivia Newton-John. So there was this nice little discussion with people going through the history of gym-based promotional videos.
I think when rock bands or their fans start to talk about legacies, they’ve all lost their fucking minds. But if there is one legacy I would like to be part of, it would be this particular legacy in an art form as notionally ephemeral as music videos. I really like the videos. It’s astonishing to see them there and to see people watching it. I only look at the metrics. I look at how many people viewed it. Then I realise most of those people are probably in Australia because that’s where our band is really liked.
The Australians like Mclusky so much they welcomed Jon Chapple into their country as an expat.
I think, administratively, that didn’t have much to do with it. I don’t think the Australian High Commission are necessarily biased towards Albini-recorded indie rock. Maybe that is on the guidance about awarding visas and stuff. Yeah, he’s been there for years apparently. Good on him, as the Aussies would say. It’s a lovely country.
Do you have anything to do with Jon, admin-related or otherwise?
Sometime in the future there could be these things called royalties on their way but I wouldn’t have to have any contact with him. Honestly, Jon and Matt [Harding] who were in the original line-up, they were obviously a huge part of the band. It wouldn’t have sounded like it did if it wasn’t for them and there are no ill-wishes from my part at all. But there’s also not a desire to see anybody. You hope they have very happy lives and you genuinely hope they don’t die prematurely so you have to say something where you’re caught between sentiment and old memories being dredged up, I suppose. Sometimes it’s a bit cartoonish and silly, the way it works in bands. Of course people who aren’t in bands anymore aren’t really going to talk but it doesn’t mean they’ve got a trail of assassins on that person’s back. It can just be a part of your life, like a relationship. You’ve got old relationships with humans, animals… Hopefully of a rather different nature. But, yeah. No contact at all. On one level, that’s a shame. But I’ve got a lot to do. I’m sure everybody else has a lot to do as well. Basic admin takes up most of your time. Who’s got time to meet up with old friends? Jesus Christ.
Bands seem to be on Ipecac Recordings for one album or about a billion.
Right. So you’re asking me which one is it going to be? Let’s see if we even get to a second album first. Of course, the decision won’t be entirely ours anyway. I’m not really a label guy. I don’t really know much about rock music. Even when we recorded Do Dallas with Albini, I wasn’t like a student of that. I knew he’d done Nirvana and a Pixies record, obviously. I was aware of Ipecac, as I was of a lot of different labels, without having an Excel spreadsheet on my computer about where I could find some of their more obscure releases on Discogs. It’s been a thoroughly pleasant experience so far.
Did you consider getting Mike Patton to do the gargling bit on ‘Autofocus On The Prime Directive’?
Gargling? You mean my singing? No, I’ve never spoken with Mike Patton so I can’t say. I’m not really a guest appearances guy. I’ve been asked twice to guest onstage with bands I really like and it’s not for me. I’d rather watch the band I like. I’d rather be prepared for what I’m doing. Just going onstage with a band but you haven’t rehearsed it? That’s not where the magic happens. That’s where the shitting yourself happens. I’m brave but only in particular contexts.
Have you seen that clip where Ed Sheeran comes onstage with The Offspring?
Do you know what? You said that sentence to me and time went backwards. I swear to God, I’ve remembered dead relatives I haven’t thought about for decades. I don’t know what you did with language there. That’s insane. We’re reading a book at the moment, me and my daughter Ella, called Inkheart which is about a girl’s father who can bring characters from books to life. I can only describe what you just said as the anti-experience of that. You’ve killed a part of my dreams. Never say those words again. I’m not having it.
Are you a better singer now than ever?
I still enjoy doing it. I still love music so much. I almost sound like I’m high. I still love what it can do. Obviously, I love the half-living it can provide me with at times. That part’s really nice. But it’s pure magic. It can lift you to places. I think one of the things I’ve realised over the last few years is that that applies even to music I don’t like. For other people, that music has that effect on them. I wouldn’t say that was humbling. I’ve never been humbled. It’s not happening. But those feelings you get from music, other people can get from… I can’t deliberately think of a band that seems like a waste of life.
Really? We can do better than this. Come on.
Erm… Towers Of London? I think that’s about as bad as it gets, isn’t it?
Which songs are you looking forward to playing live?
I’m really looking forward to playing ‘Chekhov’s Guns’. And ‘Way Of The Exploding Dickhead’ but I play bass on that so there’s the logistics of it. I’m not sure we’ll do two of the quieter songs because they’re much harder to play. Having to show poise and subtlety? That’s where real musicianship comes in and I have neither of those things. ‘People Person’ is one of those songs you can just tell is good because it gets people’s attention straight away. And not just through volume. Through a combination of factors. It’s one of those songs that doesn’t have a normal song structure but, again to bore your readers to a record breaking amount, it wasn’t noticeable until we’d finished writing it. It wasn’t like, “Let’s play with people’s preconceptions, lads!” That song is one of my absolute favourites. Even though it’s the song that gave me tinnitus.
A specific song gave you tinnitus?
‘People Person’ gave me tinnitus, yeah. We were playing it a lot in a rehearsal because we had the verses and the choruses were kind of happening but it wasn’t quite there. I woke up the next day and I was basically in the kind of Trent Reznor remix that not even a high-budget Netflix show could make bearable. I didn’t just have tinnitus. I also had hyperacusis so I couldn’t be in a room with the sound of running water for about three months. I couldn’t listen to any music for five months. Even my daughter saying something next to my ear was intensely painful. I couldn’t go to the gym because it was too loud. So I basically walked about 20 miles a day, like an actual idiot, recording loads of voice memos into my phone about ideas I had for stories. All of which are demented, by the way. When I listen back to them, I’m worried to share a room with me. I had no idea I’d be able to do music afterwards. But, as it is, if you want to do something enough, you’ll do it. That goes from starting a death cult in the Texas desert to running a moderately successful third division indie rock band based in the South West area of Great Britain.
Did you see The Guardian’s article about the best pesto brands?
I did not and I like pesto but I don’t need to read that article. What I would say about that is it’s tough for us all at the minute. We’ve all had moments when we’re not entirely sure what we’re doing. About five years ago when we were still living in London, I thought I heard a ghost in our bathroom. Not just a ghost, but a vicious ghost. I was tired and emotional at the time, I’ve got to say. It did honestly sound like a ghoul committing a war crime. It was horrendous in there. It turned out my electric toothbrush had switched itself on and was vibrating at a weird angle against the wall. I tell that story because a, I’m being all cute and vulnerable, but b, because we all lose our minds sometimes. If Guardian readers don’t know where to find pesto, then it’s all over for us. And if you mail-order pesto, that’s one of the signs that humanity doesn’t deserve to continue in its dominant form on our planet.
But you mention pesto at least once per interview.
Listen. There was a period of my life when the punchline to nearly every joke I told was “Jim Jarmusch”. Even at the time I didn’t have a full understanding of who that was but I understood what he meant. We all have our staples. We all have our things we come back to. Pesto is one of those things for me and the fact that you’ve noticed it says more about you than it does about me.
M&S, they said, was the best “all-rounder”.
If I’m going expensive for food, I’m going to Waitrose rather than M&S. And when I say that, I mean twice a year when I’m trapped at a train station.
Lidl was the best bargain pesto.
Again. So much information, so little will to process it.
Felippo Berio was the best “splurge”.
I get that sometimes, when it’s on offer. I’m a Sacla man myself. It’s unfortunate it’s too expensive. I also like the shape of the jar. It’s reassuring. You don’t feel threatened by it in any way.
Is pesto something on which you should splurge or will a budget brand suffice?
You just shouldn’t use too much. A jar of pesto could last you four meals, easy. I’ve seen some people go crazy with that pesto. It’s like a basil autopsy in there. You’ve got to take it easy with the pesto. A little drizzle of balsamic vinegar, not necessarily on the pesto but certainly adjacent to the pesto, that’s a lovely little combination of flavours. You’ve lured me into this conversation and you should feel ashamed. It’s like taking advantage of somebody.
In 2017 it was reported that some pesto has a higher salt content than McDonald’s burgers.
Doesn’t surprise me. Pesto is one of the gravest killers of middle-aged men in the South West region, I would assume. I’m not a Big Mac-ist because I don’t do the meat. Maybe pesto is the vegetarian’s Big Mac alternative because it makes you feel as if you’re embracing other cultures. “I’m having pesto. It’s not normal tomato sauce I’m having.” There’s pine nuts in it, so I’m also boasting about the fact that I don’t have an allergy.
Do you regret working for Big Pesto all these years by subliminally, no, literally working into your interviews all those pesto references?
I think pesto was only ever part of the plan, wasn’t it? The fifth column into the nation is pesto. After pesto comes more overt government corruption and… erm… tans. I mean, look at Russell Howard’s tan. That cannot be an accident. I think it’s all dependent on how much consciousness you can bring to your own relationship with pesto. You don’t want to be taking its presence for granted in the supermarket. But you don’t want to put some pesto in your trolley, make your way out of the supermarket and then suddenly find out that everything else you own originated, at least conceptually, in Italy. I’ve no idea even where this pesto is made. I’m guessing it’s all made in The Pesto Region. It’s nice because, growing up, I’d never heard of pesto. It just appeared all of a sudden. It just went, “Oh, by the way, I’m huge in Italy.” You’re thinking, “I’ve known Italian people. Why weren’t they shouting about pesto all the time?”
For my dad’s generation, that was peppers.
Oh, peppers just suddenly turned up?
That’s what he says. Before that it was just potatoes and onions.
Mclusky’s The World Is Still Here And So Are We will be released on 9 May by Ipecac
